


that world as well as this

by raven (singlecrow)



Category: Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Chromatic Yuletide, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:14:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28030716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/raven
Summary: It's a Sunday afternoon in December when Sarah gets a text from Piranesi.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 39
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	that world as well as this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hangingfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/gifts).



It's a Sunday afternoon in December when Sarah gets a text from Piranesi, about an exhibition of Ghanaian art at the Tate. If she feels like coming along, he'll meet her by the Albert Dock and they can have something to eat afterwards.

Sarah doesn't feel like it, not really. She had been hoping to go home today, after a week spent in Liverpool helping the local police with the case of a serial arsonist. Whoever they are, they've moved their base of operations from Manchester to the Liverpool docks and started setting warehouse fires. After these hectic days of talking to too many people and holding too many things in her head at once, Sarah wants only peace and quiet. No more reviewing evidence and strategising. Just the silence, the infinite halls. 

But there's no rest for the efficient here; the case is running longer than anyone expected and the Merseyside Police have asked her to stay. Sarah told Piranesi yesterday that she couldn't meet him this weekend as planned, and it seems he's decided to come to her instead. She's touched, and it's enough to get her out of her boxy Travelodge room. She texts back, _I'll be there_ , and heads out into the city.

Outside, the sky is luminous with snow. Piranesi is waiting for her by the entrance to the Tate, reading a paperback that he stuffs back into his coat pocket when he catches sight of her. She calls him _Piranesi_ , sometimes, and sometimes _Matthew_ ; it depends on the context. Right now, with the winter-pale daylight making a silhouette of him, he's the man who spent the years in the labyrinth. "Raphael," he says, with a wry smile. "Thank you for coming. I was not sure if you would be interested."

"Not really," Sarah says. "But I'm happy to see you."

A year ago, before she went into the House to bring him back, she wouldn't have been able to admit to such a thing. Having a place to go where there are no people, where there are only the statues of might-have-beens and the cool, salty water, have brought her closer to the people in her life outside. Now she understands how to be elsewhere, she understands how to live in this world, too. 

Piranesi smiles at her and goes to get their tickets, putting a fiver into the donation box. The gallery is quiet and peaceful, an oasis after the bitter cold outside. The exhibition is small and precise in its scope, a study of modern Ghanaian visual art contrasted with traditional textiles. Piranesi wanders between the mounted frames and glass cases, reviewing each item and explanatory card with intent interest. Sarah finds it peaceful without really taking in much about the art on display. A length of kente cloth in vivid orange makes her think of flame, and then, unwillingly, of what this place would look like in the aftermath of a fire, gutted and scorched the way the dockland warehouses were. The image is all-consuming, displacing the clean white walls and splashes of colour.

"We don't have to stay here, if you would rather not," Piranesi says, looking up. 

"No," Sarah says quickly, not asking how he knew she was going somewhere else in her head. "No, I'm fine here."

Piranesi nods and goes back to studying the edges of an abstract painting. After a moment, Sarah's mind clears and her attention is caught by the only other gallery visitor. An older man, Arab, distinguished in a trench coat and heavy scarf. He gives Sarah a stern look, presumably for breaking the perfect silence in here with irrelevant conversation, and moves on towards the gallery's permanent collections.

"The Ninth Northern Hall, do you think?" she asks Piranesi.

Piranesi glances over at the man's retreating back. "Yes," he says. "A scholar, I thought. He holds a marble scroll."

Sarah has never paid particular attention to that statue during her wanderings, but she will from now on: she often visits the ones whose real-life counterparts she and Piranesi have met out in the world, and contemplates which of their great deeds are commemorated in marble and stone. 

"Shall we get a sandwich?" she asks, and they leave behind the beautiful colours, and the scholar whose image looks out over the rise and fall of the Tides.

The museum café is almost deserted, in the last hour before closing. Sarah lets Piranesi get the sandwiches and sees him turn into Matthew at the counter, touching a contactless card easily to the reader as though he'd always known how to do it. Sarah feels an odd protectiveness at the sight. She helps carry over two coffees to the table and they eat and drink in silence for a while.

"Why this exhibition?" she asks, once she's demolished half a panini. "I didn't think you were particularly interested in textiles."

"It's my mam's heritage," Piranesi says. "I don't know much about it. I may have known before, and now I cannot remember."

His accent is returning, Sarah notes. She likes it, to hear him come back to who he was in this world, but hopes for his sake that he retains who he was in the other. Sarah herself is the same person in both. She wonders if that's why she travels between them so easily, a person not from here or the House, but from the liminality between.

"That makes sense, that you would want to know more about that," she says. "Have you tried talking to your mam about it?"

"It makes her sad," Piranesi says delicately, and Sarah understands that, too. On impulse she reaches out and touches his hand on the table. Piranesi glances up, startled, then smiles again. 

"I'm going home to Manchester on Wednesday, and then I intend to travel to the House," she says. She can hear her words slow, into the diction appropriate to the House and its grandeur. "I will spend the night in the Twenty-Seventh Western Hall, by the Statue of the Woman who is catching an Octopus."

Piranesi nods, visibly consulting his vast mental atlas. "Be especially careful of the Tides in that Hall. They can rise almost to the roof."

"I'll be careful," Sarah says. 

They finish up and head out just before the gallery closes, the light fading fast. Sarah buys a bag of fried doughnuts from one of the waterside stalls and they share it as they walk back to the city centre, both getting sticky from the coating of icing sugar.

"You should head back," Sarah says, handing him a tissue from her coat pocket. "If you want to get on the train before all the Christmas shoppers do."

She pauses, then adds, "Thank you for coming. It was good that you came."

Piranesi nods in acknowledgement, giving her a small smile. Sarah is suddenly intensely grateful for the peace of Piranesi's company, not laden with expectation or unnecessary words. She feels like she'll carry that peace with her into tomorrow and the next day, for all she's still in the middle of a case fifty miles from home, waiting for the setting of a fire.

"Look," Piranesi says as they leave the dock, pointing at another statue counterpart. This time it's a child, zooming along on a scooter lit with multicoloured LEDs. In recent months, figures have begun appearing in the House with the artefacts of modernity: electric scooters, lightbulbs, tablets and phones. Sarah thinks it's because she and Piranesi are regularly crossing in and out, that this has caused time to pass within. Piranesi thinks it is because the Beauty of the House is immeasurable, its Kindness infinite.

There are Christmas decorations up all over the station, some the same orange and red of the Ghanaian textiles in the exhibition, that reminded Sarah of the flames. "I'll see you soon," she says to Piranesi.

Not in the House; they're rarely there at the same time. But she'll see him out here, in this world that they both, by turns willingly and unwillingly, inhabit; and she'll see signs of him in the other place. Piranesi walks through the House like one who will always be part of it, and does not leave any sign of his presence. But he leaves things by design for Sarah, sometimes, so she knows that he'll be there if she needs him, and that the two of them are connected in that world as well as this.

"Take care of yourself, Matthew," she says, at the ticket barriers, because he's Matthew again amidst the decorations and the crowd.

"I will," he says. "You, too."

She stands at the barrier, watching him go. Tomorrow Sarah will go after her arsonist again, be all that she needs to be, tenacious and smart and uncompromising. Tonight, she can be peaceful, and complete. Piranesi waves at her as he disappears to the platform level. Sarah waves back.


End file.
